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8/5/14

No. II

When I was in high school I got one piece of very good advice from a very questionable source.

The source is more interesting than the advice in some ways. She was a girlfriend of sorts. This was marked by a year of hanging out and not being able to call her a girlfriend. After we sort of agreed on being in a relarionship she did some very un-girlfriend like things like putting other guy's penis' in her mouth and keeping me at a distance that was pathological if anything. It was a confusing time and not terribly good for my self esteem which is a kind of advice in its own way, if you can imagine, but that's not really the point. I hope I'm okay with that by now. Maybe not, though. Maybe all this self-help talk is complete bullshit and we never really get over anything, we just learn not to bring it up so much. I mean, it's possible the best we can do is not think about a thing very much anymore.

Her mother had dome something terrible to high school person. Perhaps she had imposed some rule that was unfair and unacceptable. In retrospect the things that seemed terrible then seem like parenting, now. I was sympathetically indignant and I think I agreed with her when she called her mother a bitch or some other creative insult. I was trying, I'm certain, to ingratiater myself by agreeing with her in some hopes that we would get to do the sort of thing she typically reserved for other guys at parties.

She stopped me. Her words were to the effect that She was angry at her mother and she was going to say things about her, but at some soon point she would no longer be angry and the love she had for her mother was going to be back and the last thing she needed was to know that she had forgiven her mother and the things she said would die, but she would remember the things I said and she might never know that my words would die; she would never be sure I loved her mother. Which was wise. I didn't loveher mom. I would probably not really mean those things, but she wouldn't know. She would just remember me bad-mouthing her.

So, kids, never pretend to have stake in a relationship. Listen quietly and never vocally take sides. She was a lot of things, rash, mean, damaged . . . but she was also wise and kind and beautiful about some things.